Behind POLITICO Magazine

11/14/13 12:17 PM EST

In less than four months the first 96 page issue and corresponding website was born and built. The six issue a year and daily online magazine will be a complement to POLITICO’s hyper-focused minute-by-minute inside-the-beltway coverage, Glasser said, letting readers take a step back and put the day’s biggest issues in context.

“I think that there’s a big audience both in Washington and nationally and internationally for this kind of coverage,” Glasser said. “Certainly I hope there are a lot of people who want to take a step back and look at one or two or three big things every day around core POLITICO subjects."

Glasser said the magazine is unique in that it’s free from the ties of a legacy institution or subscribers, a new machine with a brand new and even bigger tool kit than in years past. It will focus around “ideas-driven journalism,” Glasser said, and will be a new and innovative platform for outside writers and thinkers to contribute to the conversation.

“POLITICO’s ambition is in a great sense to both own and drive the Washington conversations. Some of this content gives us a chance to do so with more tools in the toolkit,” Glasser said. ”It’s a way of looking at power in different ways than if you’re just in the Washington, inside-the-beltway news cycle.”

The cover story, a deep dive by POLITICO's Glenn Thrush into President Barack Obama’s often stifled Cabinet members is POLITICO’s longest piece ever. Glasser also highlighted a piece by Rosa Brooks, a former senior Pentagon official, about Obama’s trouble relationship with the Pentagon.

“Hearing the voices of the very senior generals and recently retired military commanders that she spoke with, I can’t tell you how unusual it is,” Glasser said. “I think this, is first of all, an under covered story, the question of Obama’s troubled relationship with the Pentagon and what are the consequences of that.”

Glasser didn’t name any obvious competitors for the new magazine, instead noting that in today’s fragmented media, the competition is less institution versus institution and more over people’s time.

“The days of head to head competition are over,” Glasser said. “It’s much more of a game of 3D chess to the extent you are competing on individual stories. You might be going head to head with the New York Times with something one week and with a blog the next minutes.”

The magazine’s launch will continue next week with the roll outs of web-only features like Thursday’s “Project Beltway,” a fashionable take on the biggest Washington players with Tim Gunn and Ada Calhoun.

“We’ll be having other noteworthy features like that in addition to ambitious long form journalism for the web including POLITICO’s first mini-documentary,” Glasser said. “There will be lots of multimedia, photo essays, and on the ground reporting from Pakistan to Iowa.”